This is a double issue! Lots of amazing poetry for you to read and listen to. Excellent poems from Sofia Samatar, Lisa M. Bradley, Jaymee Goh, Bogi Takács, Sonya Taaffe, Emily Jiang, and oh so many more! [Links are to authors’ websites–for their poems click Stone Telling issue 10.]

From the editors Rose Lemberg and Shweta Narayan regarding issue 10: Speaking about the body is a radical act. The body – with its ills, idiosyncrasies and secrets, its daring, its slow or rapid disintegration; the body that is beauty of old age and the pain in bones; the labored, uncertain gasping for air that supercedes all other desires. The body and the passions of it; the shame that is societally circumscribed and weighs us down like chains; the mind, which is a part of the body, in all its brilliance and defeat. Stone Telling poets have long been in dialogue with the body. The body dancing and at rest, the body wounded and healing, the body clothed in words or stripped bare. The body fat, thin, unapologetic, apologetic, too angry to be shy, not angry enough, the body that crosses boundaries, the body that says “I am here, see me, see me,” the body that whispers, “move on, there is nothing to see”.

The body is not always the same, the body varies in brightness, its true brightness may be ascertained from the rhythm of its pulsing, the body is more remote than we imagined, it eats, it walks, it traverses with terrible slowness the distance between Wisconsin and Massachusetts, the body is stubborn, snowbound, the body has disappeared, the body has left the country, the body has traveled to Europe and will not say if it went there alone…

Sharing the good news with you! Two of my poems, “That Thief, Melancholy” and “I am the lost scarf chased by the wind, I am the snowdrift and the snow”, have been accepted by two very wonderful publications:

Theme: Body. From their website: “We are hoping to feature such themes as dis)abilities both physical and mental, neuroatypicality, queerness, aging, body acceptance, perceptions of beauty, as well as many others.”

Other editors are executive editor Delia Sherman, and fiction editors Christopher Barzak and Meghan McCarron. From their website: “Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts, is a web-based journal that extends the Interstitial Arts Foundation’s two-volume anthology series, Interfictions. As writers and editors with one foot in the academic literary community and one in the science fiction and fantasy community, we see the boundaries between genres and forms as permeable membranes, not fortified borders. Our mission is to gather pieces from wildly different corners of the writing, visual arts, and music worlds in order to showcase weird and wonderful work that falls outside conventional categories.”

Oh my goodness! It happened whilst we were moving and buying our house (which is surely a special ring of bureaucratic hell) and my life was in boxes and where did I put my socks or my driver’s license?…